This paper considers how industry-focused revenue rebating could be used to address competitiveness and leakage concerns arising from a unilaterally imposed carbon tax. Building on previous work, it investigates how firms in specific energy-intensive, trade-exposed (EITE) sectors would fare...

The National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP), housed in the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), has been providing flood insurance to households and businesses for almost 50 years. To inform the policy discussion leading up to reauthorization, this paper analyzes five aspects of the NFIP:...

A carbon tax provides certainty about the price of emissions, but it does so in a context characterized by uncertainty about its environmental benefits, economic costs, and international relations implications. Given current knowledge, suppose that the government sets a carbon tax schedule. In...

Consumers often invest in information when faced with choices that have uncertain payoffs. Homeowners considering improvements or retrofits in order to lower their energy bills may decide to have a home energy audit, a professional assessment that identifies where a home is losing energy and...

The Pacific Halibut Catch Sharing Plan creates a process for allocating halibut between the Alaska commercial and recreational charter sectors. A provision intended to allow for “flexibility” creates an inter-sectoral trading market, permitting charter operators to lease commercial halibut...

We use the classical model, a method for structured expert judgment (SEJ), to study the effects of breastfeeding on IQ. Data on the link between breastfeeding and IQ are available, e.g., the US National Longitudinal Study of Youth, however, questions about data quality and confounding mean...

Ideally, carbon offset programs issue each project a number of offset credits equal to the number of reductions in carbon emissions it achieves. Realistically, any one project likely receives more or less offset credits than the emissions it reduces. Therefore, the net emissions impact of offset...

Unconventional oil and gas production using hydraulic fracturing generates significant quantities of wastewater that may contain potentially harmful pollutants. The concerns associated with shale gas development necessitate an investigation of shale gas water and wastewater management using a...

Climate policy in the United States is near an inflection point. With Congress uninterested in new legislation, focus at the federal level for most of the last decade has been on the Clean Air Act, but whether regulation under that old statute can successfully address carbon emissions remains...

A concern often raised about a carbon tax is that it does not provide any certainty as to the quantity of emission reductions achieved under the policy. We explore in this Issue Brief how greater emission reduction certainty can be built into a carbon tax. We first define a Tax Adjustment...